Rickey Laurentiis grew up in New Orleans and earned an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. They are the author of Boy with Thorn, selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press). Boy with Thorn also won the Levis Reading Prize, and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. A 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry fellow, they have also received awards from the Whiting Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.  They are the inaugural fellow in creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.